Oracle PL/SQL Fundamentals - Part 1
Get coding quickly and effectively with Oracle PL/SQL, Oracle's database development language. This course is the first of a two part series, covering the essentials and fundamentals of Oracle PL/SQL.
What you'll learn
In this Oracle PL/SQL training, you will learn about the fundamentals of Oracle PL/SQL programming language.
You will gain a solid understanding of PL/SQL datatypes and programming constructs like loops, conditional execution, cursors and exception handling, which will enable you to do effective debugging.
Table of contents
- Overview 1m
- What is an Anonymous Block? 2m
- Structure of Anonymous Blocks 3m
- Comments in Anonymous Blocks 2m
- Demo of Anonymous Block Structure and Comment Styles 3m
- Nesting of Anonymous Blocks 1m
- Scope and Visibility of Variables in Nested Blocks 2m
- Labels 1m
- Demo: Scope and Visibility of Variables and Block Labels 4m
- Summary 1m
- Introduction 2m
- Number: Fixed and Floating Type 5m
- Assignments, Defaults and Constants 2m
- Demo: Numbers 5m
- Subtypes 4m
- %TYPE 4m
- PLS_INTEGER or BINARY_INTEGER 2m
- BINARY_DOUBLE and BINARY_FLOAT 6m
- Character Datatypes 7m
- Demo: Character 2m
- DateTime Datatypes 6m
- Demo: DateTime Datatypes 3m
- Interval Datatype 7m
- Time Datatype Usage Guidelines 1m
- Boolean Datatype 1m
- Composite Datatype: Records 5m
- Composite Datatype: %ROWTYPE 3m
- Other Datatypes 2m
- Summary 1m
Course FAQ
PL/SQL stands for "Procedural Language extensions to the Structured Query Language". It is Oracle's database development language. It is a procedural language and an extension of SQL which tells the compiler what to do and how to do it.
The main difference is that SQL executes a single query at a time, while PL/SQL executes an entire block of code at once. PL/SQL is procedural, defining how things need to be done, while SQL is declarative, defining what needs to be done.
You will learn the essentials and fundamentals of Oracle PL/SQL, including:
- What is PL/SQL and why learn it?
- Anonymous blocks
- Commonly used datatypes in PL/SQL
- Loops - for loops, while loops, nesting loops, and more
- Conditional statements - If/else/elseif, etc.
- Cursors, exceptions, debugging, and more
This is a beginner course, so you don't need to know much to get started. Because PL/SQL is an extension to SQL, knowing SQL basics would help. Some general programming knowledge would also be helpful, but is not required. If you need a refresher on the Oracle database platform in general then check out this Oracle Database fundamentals course.
This course is for anyone who wants to learn Oracle PL/SQL, and anyone who works with large sets of data and wants to become more efficient at understanding it.
About the author
Pankaj Jain is an experienced technologist, with expertise in various aspects of software development lifecycle, architecting software solutions and software development. He has worked on an array of technologies, with focus on Oracle at the database layer and Java at the web tier. He is a certified Oracle 11g DBA. He lives in Seattle with his wife Simita and boys Ronit and Rohak. When he is not playing with technology, he likes spending time with his kids, travelling and doing photography.